Working, In Fact And Fiction

Menial Jobs, Moral Dilemmas

April 28, 2002|By CAROLE GOLDBERG; Courant Books Editor

A WORKING STIFF'S MANIFESTO

By Iain Levison, Soho Press, 154 pp., $23

DONE IN BY INNOCENT THINGS

By william Eisner, GreyCore Press, 221 pp., $23.

Looking for work? Don't mind getting your hands dirty? How about sleeping five to a tiny cabin on a beat-up old ship moored in an Alaskan harbor, where your mates are criminals or crazies or both? How about pulling the legs off steamed crabs on the ``slime line'' 12 hours a day or shoving chest-high pile after pile of squirming live fish through a hole in the wall?

Doesn't suit you? It didn't suit Iain Levison either, but he did it. He also was a fish cutter in an upscale supermarket, a gofer for an independent film, a furniture schlepper and an oil delivery guy. Over a period of 10 years he landed 42 menial jobs, quit 30, lost nine and says he can't remember what happened with the others.

As an itinerant worker, he says he is one of the ``modern-day Tom Joads'' who graduated ``with a $40,000 fly swatter in their hands and got rejected from 20 interviews in a row, then gave up. They're the people who thought, I'll just take this temporary assignment/bartending job/parking lot attendant position/pizza delivery boy job until something better comes up, but something better never does.''

Armed with that most impractical of degrees -- a bachelor's in English -- he chronicles a decade of working for food (and shelter) The book is mordantly funny -- check out the mishap when he assumes a large ceramic donkey on a front lawn is a cleverly disguised intake for a fuel oil tank -- and understandably bitter. He encounters petty bosses, themselves clinging precariously to the lower rungs of the career ladder, and endures scam artists posing as employers. He does backbreaking work for miserable pay.

He's not the only author to mine this territory in recent years. Barbara Ehrenreich did high-stress, low-pay work for her ``Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,'' and Ben Cheever entered the grimly cheerful world of the service industry in ``Selling Ben Cheever.'' Levison, however, wasn't doing research for a possible bestseller. He was working to survive. It made him aggressive and angry, and, fortunately for us, articulate.

He sees a world where people are expendable, loyalty and effort are not rewarded, and the bottom line is on top. He worked hard for his insights, and they are well worth your attention.

William Eisner did make it to the top. After a career as an engineer and electronics company CEO, he decided to pursue writing full-time. His ``The Sevigny Letters'' came out in 1995 and now, at age 70, he's published a short story-collection, ``Done In By Innocent Things.'' Many of the 13 stories have workplace settings. In ``Heist,'' the main character is an accountant who decides to rob a bank. -- and this well before Enron. ``The Baby Rocker,'' ``The Visit'' and ``Rainstorm'' pose moral dilemmas: When, if ever, should loyalty to the company or terror at the prospect of losing your job take precedence over doing the right thing?

Other stories are more personal and more powerful. In ``Arthur,'' the husband of an increasingly demented woman finds a poignant way to reconnect with her. In ``An Afternoon at the Movies,'' the narrator reviews his parents' difficult marriage as though watching a grainy black-and-white documentary.

While Eisner is adept at creating interesting characters in provocative situations, too many of his stories share a flaw. They sail gracefully along until the final page or paragraph, only to be sandbagged by moralizing passages that bring them thudding down. That's a shame, because there is some fine writing here, done in, innocently enough, by the wish to tie the messiness of life up in a neat little package.